How is mass mail-in-voting fundamentally a less secure system than in-person voting?
In this episode, we speak with former DOJ lawyer Christian Adams, the President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and founder of the Election Law Center.
We also talk to Craig Huey, founder of the Election Forum, which seeks to inform and engage Christian voters.
This is American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
Jan Jekielek: Christian Adams, great to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Christian Adams: Hi there.
Mr. Jekielek: Christian, former President Obama has basically said that, “There’s no legal basis for the challenges being presented by the Trump legal team.” What are your thoughts?
Mr. Adams: Of course, courts decide that, not President Obama. In the case of Pennsylvania, you have pretty meritorious, I didn’t say successful, but meritorious arguments that the court and other officials tinkered with the legislative rules. The legislators are supposed to set the rules of an election—not state courts, not states’ election officials.
I had a case where I brought a lawsuit against the Virginia Board of Elections this year because they were making up rules that were contradictory to the legislature, and I won that case. I had the rules enjoined in Virginia that would have allowed ballots to come in late with no postmark, just like in Pennsylvania. So in the case of Pennsylvania, there’s some very sound arguments being made by the Trump campaign.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk a little more about Pennsylvania. I was just looking at some new data that was polled. Basically, a fellow named Matt Braynard has been calling, it’s sort of polling people, around their absentee ballots or their mail-in ballots. Here’s a couple of things that he found, and I wanted just to get your sense on what this would mean. And I’m taking this data at face value. So among 1706 respondents we reached who the state said were sent an absentee ballot, 556 said they never requested it. This is in Pennsylvania. The second thing is, of the 1137 who did request the ballot, 453 said they mailed back, yet the state did not receive or count their ballot.
Mr. Adams: This gets into the problem of vote by mail that I’ve been warning about since March where people don’t have their ballots counted. It disenfranchises. That’s the value of having things happen on Election Day where everybody can watch what’s happening and not turning it over to the U.S. post office that routinely delivers you your neighbor’s mail.
But is that going to overturn the election? No. That’s interesting evidence of screw-ups, but it’s not going to change the outcome in Pennsylvania. It’s an interesting anecdote for future fixes of the process, but this is a problem of ballots. This is a problem of ballots; it’s not a problem of machines. It’s a problem of the system of mailing ballots. It’s not some magic elves working in the machines that are causing problems. There’s paper out there. We’ll know who won this election based on the paper, not because of some machine glitches .You can recount the paper.
Mr. Jekielek: In this group, almost a third, not quite a third, are saying they mailed in but the state didn’t receive or count them. That seems like a huge discrepancy.
Mr. Adams: That’s called mail balloting. I’ve been saying this all over the country since March: when you have mail ballots, you have mistakes—period. When you turn the system over to the post office, you have screw-ups that are going to occur. That was going to happen, but it’s not going to be enough to overturn the election. That’s why mail balloting is a disaster. Plus you have people who don’t remember they requested ballots, people who maybe had other people requested for them improperly—that’s the problem with male balloting. You can’t have a system like that.
Mr. Jekielek: Hey Christian, let’s go to Georgia. I have a couple of bits of new information from Georgia. The Secretary of State of Georgia’s office is saying that Floyd County, you might be familiar with this, found 2600 ballots during the audit, basically that hadn’t been tabulated. They were on a card. The Secretary actually is looking for the Elections Director to step down. Tell me about this. What is the significance?
Mr. Adams: This is why you have things like audits. This is why you have things like recanvassing and recounts to catch these sorts of glitches. This happens every election. … It’s not a surprise to me at all; it’s just a matter of “thank goodness they had an audit in Georgia to catch it” because that’s what audits and recanvasses and recounts are designed to do. So it’s very, very good news that they caught this.
Mr. Jekielek: Two thirds of these votes were, I believe, for Trump, so a net gain of 800. Do you think these are just accidents? Basically, is that what I’m getting from you?
Mr. Adams: It happens every single election. A lot of folks don’t pay attention to the election process, except this week. This week, everybody’s an expert. This is a 365-day-a-year job, this is an odd year job, not an even numbered job. That’s one of the reasons the Public Interest Legal Foundation exists because we work on this sort of stuff every single day of every single year, and what you have described happening is the kind of stuff that happens in every election. Elections are not perfect and they frequently have mistakes like this, and thank goodness we have a system in place in Georgia to catch it.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about something that’s actually different between 2016 and 2020 also in Georgia, and I thought this was pretty fascinating. The news journalist Carrie Sheffield just looked into this and according to the U.S. Elections Project, the rejection rate for the absentee ballots of 2016 was about 6.4 percent. This year, it’s about 0.2 percent, effectively about 30 times lower than in the last election. What are your thoughts?
Mr. Adams: Great news. That is fantastic news in the sense that people are not being disenfranchised. What happened, what caused that in large measure [is] again, not any kind of conspiracy. What has been happening is that a lot of groups have been pouring millions of dollars, starting back in March, into the process of educating voters how to correctly fill out their ballot. They’ve been pouring resources into this to drive those numbers downward. There’s still 2 percent disenfranchisement. That’s still bad. So the reason you had this drop—
Mr. Jekielek: That’s 0.2 percent. Sorry.
Mr. Adams: Right. You still have people not having their votes counted. That’s the problem with vote by mail usually: you have people who don’t get their votes counted. So all of this effort was put into creating education, a system in place to drive that number downward.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump to Nevada here. Again, a new report I got last night that Clark County Commission just threw out an election that represents almost one sixth of the total votes cast in Clark County because there were too many discrepancies to be sure that the results can be certain—153,000 votes in this election. Are you familiar with this?
Mr. Adams: I heard something about this but not enough to really speak with any authority except to say, the reason this probably matters for a smaller office is the rule generally is, and this is important to understand, you don’t change election results or do anything unless the number of screw-ups, fraudulent, whatever you want to call it, ballots exceeds the margin of victory. So this is probably some small isolated race where the number of screw-ups is greater than the margin of victory. You can’t say that on a statewide basis, but in this smaller election that probably was what happened there.
Mr. Jekielek: I think that’s what’s being discussed. This is another question. There’s the two envelopes, and once one envelope gets removed and gets tossed, then it’s impossible to match them subsequently. If there’s too many discrepancies, you can’t actually use it. Do I understand that correctly?
Mr. Adams: Don’t forget why you have that second envelope. It’s a secrecy envelope. If you just stuck your absentee ballot in an envelope that had your name on it, then everybody would know how you voted, so that second envelope has a function to protect the secrecy of the ballot.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of the counts of the ballots being stopped in the middle of the night on election night? There’s a number of these instances. People have been very concerned about this, saying that it’s anomalous, why didn’t they keep counting, so on and so forth. What are your thoughts?
Mr. Adams: It is anomalous, but it’s anomalous because we had so many doggone ballots by mail this year. It’s anomalous because we’ve shifted half of the election into the U.S. Postal Service, so when suddenly you’re getting all of these envelopes and ballots that you have to process on election night, it slows the process down.
Normally, you want to have the count take place and finish up on Election Day. That’s how it ought to be. Doesn’t mean it has to be, but that’s how it ought to be. When you have all these millions of ballots coming in, you have to open up the envelope, you have to take them out, flatten them out, make sure it’s somebody who’s eligible to vote, run them through the processor—it slows the whole bloody process down. So that’s one of the reasons why you don’t want to have the election go to vote by mail because you don’t get results. You don’t get results like we ought to on or very close to Election Day.
Mr. Jekielek: So you, of course, have been very against the mail-in balloting. How much does that open things up to fraud compared to the normal scenario where there’s just this small percentage of absentee ballots?
Mr. Adams: I want people to stop focusing so much on fraud, because it’s not always like this conspiracy with the Joker and the Penguin. There’s a great Batman episode where they stole an election against Batman. It’s not that simplistic. When you do vote by mail, you decentralize the process. You crank in error.
Error is not the same as fraud. You crank in mailing things in Nevada to dead voters. People don’t live at the address where they’re supposed to be, they live at vacant lots. There was a great video we produced at the Public Interest Legal Foundation showing the mines, the liquor stores, the vacant lots where these registered voters are. Then when they get the ballots, you crank in problems where other people may be assisting or touching those ballots.
That doesn’t necessarily mean fraud but it means they lose things. So yes, fraud is a component. I’ve proven fraud in federal court in cases that I’ve brought. But at the same time, you also have error, and I think people need to focus almost more on the error side than the fraud. You wouldn’t build a decentralized system if you’re trying to have security. There’s no observers.
There’s no help, that’s the other thing. There’s no help if you’re voting at your kitchen table. There’s no election official who can help you fix mistakes on the ballot, and so you end up mailing your ballot in with mistakes, it doesn’t get counted. When you have a centralized system, there’s people that are ready to assist you. So it’s not just fraud. It’s all kinds of disasters, micro-disasters, that take place when you have a vote by mail system.
Mr. Jekielek: I still find it hard to believe, based on what you just said, that the rate of rejection could get so low because of people’s education, all of a sudden.
Mr. Adams: They did, and they also had other things that happened. You can’t just say, “Oh, look at the rate of rejection dropped. There must be something nefarious here.” You had laws all throughout the country being changed by federal courts that got rid of things that would have led to rejection. You had courts changing the laws.
That’s not a function of fraud. That’s a function of, number one, more education; number two, courts change the rules; number three, election officials change the rules. So you’re going to have lower rates of rejection because of all the atmospherics that took place, not because somebody working at the check-in station who’s taking bribes, saying, “Oh, I’m going to accept all these ballots.” No, no, no, no. That’s a dumb explanation.
The smart explanation is, the courts have been changing the rules since April. I worked on these cases in Virginia and other states. Election officials have been getting rid of barriers, and I don’t like the term “barriers” but let’s just use it here, where you have to do certain things to get your mail vote counted. They’ve been knocking those down, and then lastly, there has been an education campaign. So all three of those efforts have lowered the rejection rate. It’s not some sort of evil doers sitting in the election office.
Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts before we finish up?
Mr. Adams: Yes. We’ll know what happened in this election when we look at the paper. When we go through the ballots as best we can, we will know what happened. It’s not a function of electronic machines, it’s a function of the whole system being turned upside down this year through court litigation, through election officials, and decentralization of the process.
Mr. Jekielek: Christian Adams, good to have you on.
Mr. Adams: All right. Take care.
Mr. Jekielek: Craig Huey, great to have you on the show.
Craig Huey: Jan, it’s great to be with you.
Mr. Jekielek: Craig, we just had an elections expert on the show actually, Christian Adams. We were asking him about some various details. We’re going to focus with you a little bit more about some of the basic realities that our audiences might not be familiar with. But before I do that, I’m going to ask you the same question I asked him to start the interview, which is quite simply that former President Obama said the other day that there’s no legal basis for the challenges that the Trump team right now has. What are your thoughts on that?
Mr. Huey: I think that is completely wrong. We have so much evidence of voter fraud as a result of out-harvesting in the vote by mail ballot and other types of corrupt practices, that we need to be able to make sure this election and future elections are honest and trustworthy, and unless we pursue these challenges in court and prove what is true and what is not—Republicans, Democrats, independents, Libertarians, everybody needs to have trust in the election. It’s the only way we’re going to have it.
Mr. Jekielek: So Craig, from your perspective, where are we at right now in terms of knowing who the next President of the United States is going to be?
Mr. Huey: We’re right now hitting a hard deadline. The investigation into election fraud has to be done quickly. Otherwise, it’s an unstoppable event that’s about ready to happen and that will be the election of Joe Biden. But if we’re able to prove that there are too many election irregularities in time, we can reverse what’s going on right now that the media says Trump has lost.
Mr. Jekielek: Tell me a little more. Where do you think things are at in the process? Are you seeing any evidence of this? Where are we at?
Mr. Huey: There’s hundreds and hundreds of documented illegal voting that has taken place. Jan, basically, we have an election system that has been broken. It’s been broken on purpose. There’s three reasons we have a problem today. Number one is ballot harvesting, number two, it’s the mail-in ballots, and number three, it’s the traditional voter fraud. I think if we talk about ballot harvesting, some of the issues can become pretty clear.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with ballot harvesting then.
Mr. Huey: Many of the viewers may not know exactly what ballot harvesting is. It’s legal in 29 states, it’s illegal in 18 states, and even in those states where it’s illegal, it’s still being done. Ballot harvesting is where somebody can collect ballots. Nobody knows who they are; there’s no audit trail of those ballots. They simply drop them off at a voter box or at the voter center. Some of these ballot harvesters will go door to door.
And they have data, and Jan, what they do is they know who’s going to be their voter. They have the data on what their key beliefs are, who’s the persuadable, who’s the likely voter. They won’t talk to somebody who’s not. And then they tell them, “I’ll be glad to help you fill out that ballot, from the president down to city council, and I’ll help you be able to get that in, because I’ll deliver it to the voter center itself,” and people hand these ballots to them.
An example is … it’s been caught, a lady named Lulu was one of the paid volunteers of the Democrats who go door to door with the data. She has been in this house six times, and she can’t get a hold of her voter who’s the daughter of the two Republicans, and the Republicans answer the door, and she doesn’t want to talk to them. She only wants to talk to the daughter.
In fact, if the Republicans had talked to her, she could have thrown away their ballots. There’s no integrity in [ballot] harvesting. It’s open to fraud. It’s open to grammy farming where you can go to a nursing home and pick up 100, 200, 300 ballots. It’s open to being able to go to an apartment, and get the ballots that have arrived, and fill them out, and return them.
This ballot harvesting is where in California as an example, two years ago, seven Republican congressmen in Republican districts won the election. The day after, they lost the election because of ballot harvesting, because all the ballots arrived in the last couple of days and they were counted last, and that’s what we see has happened in this election.
So the ballot harvesting is ripe with the potential of voter fraud, but it’s hard to prove and takes time to prove it, and that’s the problem that the Trump team has right now. They have to prove it, and it takes a lot of time. But we’ve got to get to the bottom of it so that by 2022, we have true and honest elections.
Mr. Jekielek: What you’re describing, certainly where the ballot harvesting is actually legal in these 29 states, from the sounds of it, it’s perfectly legitimate for people to do that. Of course, they can’t fill out ballots for people and so forth, or tell them how to vote, but they can pick up as many ballots as they like.
Mr. Huey: Yes, and again, there’s no audit trail. So basically what they have done, the unions, the organizers, they become proficient in how to do this. In California, there’s a little bit of organization in the Republican Party, [but] very little anywhere else. California had legalized ballot harvesting. What had happened was that the churches, 400 churches that were open despite the lockdown, despite the fact that the governments ordered churches closed, 400 churches that were meeting still had a box where they asked people to bring in the ballot, and the pastor would bring it in. So conservatives, libertarians, Christians, Republicans, they can do ballot harvesting. They’re just not trained.
The unions train people how to do it. The radicals train people how to do it. Jan, the fact is, when you have the data of knowing who to go to, you can increase your voter turnout 6 to 10 percent. That transforms an election. That switches people who would normally win into losers, and people who would normally lose into winners, and so it is a powerful thing.
Ballot harvesting is not voter fraud but it leads to voter fraud, and there’s no verification of the vote. One of the things that has really shaken the election is, again, having a voter guide by the ballot harvesters where they tell them here’s how to vote, they can show them exactly how to vote, down to city council, and so it transforms the election. They do that from the top to the bottom.
Mr. Jekielek: Basically, you’re saying, whoever has the better harvesting machine, so to speak, can win?
Mr. Huey: That’s 100 percent right. You tie advanced data modeling of the voters, give it to the ballot harvesters, and have a mobilization. Sometimes they’ll have copies, sometimes they’ll have meetings, sometimes they’ll go door to door. Here’s the thing—election is no longer about who has the best polls, who’s the most honest, who’s the best candidate, who’s better on TV, it doesn’t matter these days. If you can mobilize a base to get out to vote with ballot harvesting, you’re the winner.
Mr. Jekielek: This sounds like something that’s going to be an issue, I suppose, for these runoff elections that are coming up in Georgia and future elections. But in terms of looking back at the integrity of this specific election, what else are you seeing?
Mr. Huey: You have all the states, so many states, they mailed about everyone. The problem with that is that these states weren’t prepared. The State of Washington has done this for five years, and they were prepared for the mail-in ballots. The other states were not and the whole system just collapsed. When you do this, there’s several areas of fraud that can be proven and did happen in this election.
First of all, the voter rolls are broken and terrible. Throughout the United States, you have people who are dead, you have people who have moved, you have people who get duplicate ballots. We call it a clean voter roll, it doesn’t exist. These need to be cleaned up before you do any type of mail-in ballot.
So what has happened, and many of your viewers probably have had it happen to themselves, people get a ballot for their kid who’s gone, they get a ballot from somebody who lived in the apartment or house two or three years ago and moved, and dead people get the ballots. In California, about 400,000 ballots were people who’ve died or moved away.
What I did, when I wrote my book, “The Deep State,” in “The Deep State” book, I have a chapter on [Voter] Fraud. What I did is I had one of the people who assisted me in writing the book contact the voter office and register her dog at an office address. At that time, my office was in California.
For two elections, I got the vote by mail ballot for the dog. I could’ve sent it in, nobody would have known. And then I moved my office to Tennessee—and you know what happened, Jan? That ballot, this year, followed me to my new office in Tennessee. That’s corruption, that should not happen, and there’s no way anybody’s going to find that was a dog because there’s no way to tell.
This is just one of many things that’s broken and wrong with the system, and we’ve got to correct this. We can’t allow another election to happen without having this type of thing cleaned up, and certainly, you can’t send out ballots to people who are dead or moved away and have this type of corruption.
Jan, there’s one more problem with all these people getting the ballots. When people get the ballots—[people] called “low propensity voters,” the people who don’t care, people who won’t go out to the polls—when they get these ballots, you can define how often they go out and vote. They have very little knowledge about the election. They don’t care about the election. They’re willing to hand those ballots out to anybody.
One of the prime target markets are these low propensity voters, to get them out. So in this type of election, to be able to do this massive send-the-ballot-out-to-everyone, people are getting duplicate ballots, people are getting ballots when they have no intention to vote, but they get a knock on the door and they hand them the ballot. This is wrong, and this is leading to the potential of paying people, giving them bribes, all kinds of things in order to get that ballot.
So these things need to be corrected, and they need to be corrected quickly. This is what is the problem. The Trump team is looking at this and how do you determine what is fraud, what’s not, and it’s very time consuming, very hard, and time’s against Trump.
Mr. Jekielek: So let’s talk about that. What are the deadlines?
Mr. Huey: The states have to certify the Electoral College in the election, and then there’s the Electoral College. So we’re talking about coming up with a deadline in late November, and we’re talking about having a deadline in mid-December. If these things don’t happen, and prove that they can be taken to a judge by that time, there’s no way it’s going to prevail.
One of the things that the Supreme Court always does is try to keep some continuity, and keep things with as little controversy as it can. If this goes to the Supreme Court, there’s not going to be an overthrowing of the election. There’s not going to be a re-election. It could be something that they determine was wrongly done or Pennsylvania or Georgia was wrongly done. The court is not going to overturn the election.
Mr. Jekielek: So basically, you’re saying there’s a couple of weeks here for this. What is this first deadline that you’re talking about? Tell me more explicitly.
Mr. Huey: The deadline is you’re going to have to have a certification by the states of the election. That’s what the Trump teams’ hurtle is—to be able to either postpone that certification or to delay that certification because they can prove that things were done illegally.
Once the certification happens, then the electoral college will meet. When the electoral college meets, they are chosen by the party that wins in that state. Let’s say that Biden wins in Nevada. Those electoral college votes will actually be people that are favorable to Biden. Everybody expects them to vote for Biden, no matter what.
The way the founders set this up was brilliant. They can actually vote for Trump. They could vote for somebody else. Back in 1972 I believe it was, John Hospers was a Libertarian Party candidate. Obviously he did not win. Richard Nixon won. But what happened was that one Electoral College out of Virginia who should have voted for Nixon actually switched and voted for the Libertarian Party candidate. He could legally do so. The electoral college can switch. But once the electoral college is decided upon and they vote, then the election is basically over.
Mr. Jekielek: You also mentioned earlier, it’s not just that there is fraud—I think there’s some definite examples of fraud. But the question is, does it occur on a scale where it warrants delay or these other scenarios you were describing. From what you’re seeing, are you seeing any possibility of that?
Mr. Huey: I do believe that they can show that there’s enough to change the swing state elections, but not enough time to be able to prove it. I view this as a long term process. Trump’s legacy is certainly fighting the swamp and the deep state. His legacy is exposing the big media—the biased media, exposing big tech and the corruption of big tech. He has a legacy in many things.
One of his major legacies, I hope, will be to expose the corruption that’s going on in Democratic cities in the vote-by-mail ballot, and the ballot harvesting, and prove that it’s too much open to fraud and has to be changed, and transform our elections so the world can see that they’re honest—people can trust that they’re honest.
Voting fraud is something that when your god is the government, and your religion is to transform that government, you’ll do anything you can to cheat for your candidate. Republicans, normally, will look at an election [thinking] it’s the best person running; it’s the best policy.
But to many people, their goal is to win that election at any cost. They will stuff the ballots; they will do things that are illegal; they will do things and try to get away with it and hide it. They’re pretty good at hiding it. Those things have to be stopped as much as we can, and recognize people try to do that. You have to have the safeguards in place to make sure it cannot happen.
Mr. Jekielek: So where else do you see right now are the pressure points?
Mr. Huey: One of the problems that you have with the mail-in-vote is the corruption of the post office itself, and in several different ways. Number one, the United States Postal Service is a “Bernie Sanders union.” Back in the 2016 election, they endorsed Bernie Sanders. In 2020, they endorsed Bernie Sanders and then switched to Joe Biden after Joe Biden became the candidate.
Actually two years ago, they were charged with using employees to do electioneering on postal time. A judge prohibited that. But the union organizes an army of people to get out the vote. The problem is when you have a postal union that is political and biased, it affects the mail delivery.
There is evidence that conservative and Republican mail was tampered with, ballots were tampered with. One of the things I do is I have an advertising agency where we’ve won 97 awards in the last 20 years. We’ve mailed a billion pieces of direct mail. So I deal with the post office all the time.
You have inefficiencies in the post office where two to three percent of all the mail disappears—always disappears. You have the fact that the post office had mobilized like never before in this last election, because so many of the ballots being returned were going to be so late, 7, 14, 16 days late, instead of delivery within one or two days. And they tried to correct it, but you still have a certain percent of the mail late. Even today some of the ballots are being returned by the post office.
One of the issues has to do with this postal monopoly which has a $68 billion deficit that has become a political organization. You can’t rely upon them when you’re doing an election.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s fascinating to hear this.
Mr. Huey: I’ll give you other examples. If you did a Google search for postal employees or the post office regarding ballots that were discovered in trash cans and in employee trucks in the last four months—there’s probably been one hundred of those cases reported in the press across the United States where the postal employees have been charged with a crime.
In the post offices’ investigation, why were these ballots set aside? Well, that’s the tip of the iceberg. That’s the stuff that’s been caught. You really have a broken system, because it’s a monopoly. The union made it incredibly inefficient, impossible to fire somebody, and it’s a political organization. With all this, just think of their self interest to survive.
The post office needs a bailout. They will get a bail out if Georgia switches one or two candidates to Democrat, and you have a House, Senate, and the President, you’re going to have a historic bail out of the post office for their inefficiencies. And it’s all on the taxpayers, and it’s going to continue the inefficient monopoly. It’s got to change and it won’t change with a bail out.
Mr. Jekielek: To clarify, when you talk about the deep state, you’re talking about the administrative state of the government, is that right?
Mr. Huey: That is correct. My book on the deep state basically talks about what it is. I go into the supporters of the deep state, like the big media and the foundations, but the core of it is this. Since the beginning of government, there’s been a deep state, not just here in the United States. And that’s the government bureaucracy. That’s the government employees.
Normally, government employees do two things. Number one, they try to protect what they’re doing. They don’t want anybody to see what they’re doing. They want to be able to do it at their own pace, and they don’t want to have exposure of what they’re doing. Number two, they want more money and power. They want to expand the government bureaucracy. They want to expand what they’re doing, even if what they’re doing is almost nothing. They want to expand it. That’s the normal way a bureaucrat acts.
Now, President Obama brought in a third element that was very unusual. He brought in people who were in their 20’s. If you went to Washington, DC in 2007, you didn’t see what you saw after the election in 2009. So in the 2008 election, Obama became president in 2009 and brought in all these bureaucrats that were in the 20’s. They were in their 20’s, and they were ideologically driven.
Their purpose was to use the bureaucracy to transform culture and politics. I write about how they were doing that, and how when Trump came into office, they became the resistance and tried to resist everything Trump did, not because they’re normal bureaucrats, but because they’re ideologically driven. Before Obama left office, he put in place barriers to firing these bureaucrats.
Trump did an amazing job of trying to clean house, but only did the tip of the iceberg on that. That’s because of the laws. He even went to the extent where he couldn’t fire some people in the bureaucracy, so he moved the bureaucracy to a different state—so that the people would resign and not go to the new state, and that had some success.
Now, Biden’s going to bring the Bernie Sanders ideologues into the government again, where you’re going to have an invisible army of the deep state, again trying to transform culture and politics—through their power, through their influence, and through their governmental action. This is going to be something that will not be good for America, and it certainly is going to be horrific for freedom. It’s not going to be good for the economy. So we need to be watching what’s going on with the Deep State under Biden.
Mr. Jekielek: Craig, I can tell you the Epoch Times position on who will be the next president is when these votes are actually certified. At this point, we don’t see that as having happened. But you’re speaking about it as if it’s a fait accompli.
Mr. Huey: You know that President Trump is the President of the United States until Inauguration Day. But he’s up against hard deadlines that are built into the Constitution and built into law. It’s unlikely you’re going to see any judge suspending that based upon the enormous task of proving fraud. We can hope for it. We can pray for it. But we want to be realistic. It’s an uphill battle. He could prevail. Whether he prevails or not, this is what he’s got to do. He’s got to expose the voter fraud so it can be changed and not happen two years from now.
Mr. Jekielek: Craig, you’re coming at this, looking at this from a Christian perspective.
Mr. Huey: Well, yes. I’ve been a youth pastor and a singles pastor, but I’m also a business owner. And as a business owner, I have an ad agency that has clients worldwide. I’m an expert on marketing and advertising. That’s why I’m an expert on what the left is doing—what they did in this election. They did an incredible, historic job—Biden’s group did—that wiped out what the Republican votes were.
Four years ago, Trump’s team outdid Hillary’s team. This time, Biden’s team outdid Trump’s team from a marketing standpoint. With their digital marketing and their targeted marketing this time, they actually spent close to thirty million dollars in reaching conservative Catholic and evangelical Christians.
And why is that important? Because four years ago it was the evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics in the swing states that gave President Trump his margin of victory. The evangelicals voted 81 percent for Trump. That was historical. It was because of his policies. It was because of what he said about Israel and religious liberty, and what he said about being pro-life. He even talked about the persecuted church.
I was in a meeting of Christian leaders back in New York, where one third of them were against Trump, one third of them were for Trump and one third of them didn’t know. His first thing to all these people who he had to win over, he came out and said, “I want to restore the pastor’s first amendment rights, so from the pulpit they can speak about truth, politics, and culture.”
Everybody looked at everybody absolutely shocked because nobody ever talked about repealing the Johnson Amendment that silences pastors throughout the United States. What Trump did caused everybody to stand up and give him a standing ovation. He won over the crowd at that moment. His alliance with the evangelicals has been pretty solid and steady.
What the Biden team did—unlike Hillary who ignored evangelical Christians—she insulted them. In fact, Biden reached out to them. He had a whole department spending thirty million dollars for direct mail, radio, TV, and lots of digital ads going to Christians. He identified which Christians were likely to be suppressed. In other words, they wouldn’t go out and vote. He identified those Christians that could possibly be persuaded to go for Biden. He was able to do an incredibly smart marketing job in the Christian community.
What have the exit polls shown at this point? Instead of getting 81 percent evangelicals, it looks like Trump has gotten 76 percent evangelicals, still huge. But when you lose that margin, and you have an election as close as this, that’s the difference between winning and losing, sadly, throughout the United States. Because Trump did not do an organized effort towards evangelicals.
Most pastors sat this election out. I listened to three sermons, the church I went to and to online services of well-known pastors. They never even mentioned the election on Sunday. That happened throughout the United States. In the locked-in states where the churches were closed, where they were going to do church ballot harvesting, there was no ability to communicate, and no ability to do the church ballot harvesting. So much fell apart in this election to the faith community.
One of the reasons I wrote the Christian Voter book was to be able to mobilize the Christians. We had people sending this book to people in the swing states—pastors and youth leaders. Now there’s a concentrated effort in the next few weeks to get as many of the Christian Voter books into the hands of the evangelicals in the youth pastor, the singles pastor, the woman’s pastor, and the main pastor of these Georgian churches that were impacted by this election.
Because the Democrats already have their data, about who to get to the poll, they’re not going to find very many more. The Republicans hopefully have their data on who to get to the polls, and they’re not going to get much more. The big group, which are the evangelical Christians, less than 50 percent of them actually voted in this last election.
Mr. Jekielek: Craig Huey, it’s such a pleasure to have you on.
Mr. Huey: Great. Thanks.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and brevity.
American Thought Leaders is an Epoch Times show available on YouTube, Facebook, and The Epoch Times website. It airs on Verizon Fios TV and Frontier Fios on NTD America (Channel 158).
